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Homeschooling and Raising Boys Differently Than Girls (Brett Cooper and Erica Komisar Reactions) · The Family Teams Podcast

• 0:00
  Hey everybody, welcome back to the podcast. Okay, we have a special episode for you guys. So we have been posting some reels lately on Instagram and some have gone absolutely bonkers. And I like to dive into, obviously what is catching people's attention. These are conversations people really wanna have.
• 0:15
  So what I want to do is just dive into a few of these reels, and we've already reacted to them, so I will let those things stand. But I would like to interact with some of the comments, and I think it's really important for us to drill into the topic and even ask the question, why is this striking a nerve? So the first one is Brett Cooper, and she goes into detail in this reel about the reason, ultimate reason, why she is happy that she was homeschooled. So just to remind you guys, this is what she said.
• 0:44
  When you look at the statistics of how much time kids are spending with their parents these days, it's like 35 minutes a day. That's it? When you remove bathing, making dinner, when you are face to face with your kid, bonding, doing an activity where you are interacting, that's an average of 35 minutes a day. The benefit of homeschooling is the opportunities and the freedom that you do have. I didn't have to finish all my classes by a certain period. I had nine months. If I wanted to get everything done in two weeks, I could have. I had so much flexibility to do
• 1:10
  everything that I was interested in. I took art classes, I did gymnastics, I volunteered. And that was only because I had the time to do it. I was not in school until 3 p.m. I spent so much time with my family. My relationship with my mom is one of the things that I'm most proud of. I inherited a lot of her values because I spent so much quality time with her that she was the one who raised me, not a teacher. And I think that that is so important because
• 1:31
  All right. So one of the comments that we got on this was from Costume Design Arena. She said, wish we could afford it, surviving on one income with no family on this continent. This is, I think, a constant challenge that people have. Some of the responses are Abigail Schwartz said, we are a one income family and lower middle class. It's very possible.
• 1:57
  A lot of people are interacting with this. How do you think generations of your family did it with much less? That's a really good question. Another response is perhaps you can if you consider working as well. We've been homeschooling since day one. We have six kids. Our oldest 18 graduated this last school year. We were one income for a long time.
• 2:16
  And mind you that my husband works for an industry that doesn't pay very well. So we sacrificed a lot from the type of house we live in to saying no to certain niceties. But on the last four years due to job difficulties for my husband, I had to step in and work part time. It was very hard at first because I had created an expectation of my role as homemaker in homeschool was was it. And working could never be done. I was very wrong. All to say.
• 2:42
  that when there is a will, there's a way. Don't underestimate what a loving mother could do for her children. You can do it if you want to. And then some prayer emojis. Okay. So this is, yeah, this is actually the way this conversation is primarily framed. And even in our comment section, this is what happened. And that is that a lot of people, when they think about the topic of homeschooling, they think of it as primarily an economic issue, right? This is,
• 3:08
  the way I think a lot of us look at it, because it's very difficult to imagine doing this if you don't have somebody staying at home and very focused on homeschooling. And I think that one of the challenges, and this is part of why I find this conversation really interesting, I think it's really important for people to share stories about what they had to sacrifice to make this a reality. It's really important to always take a step back and just admit, when you're approaching a decision like this,
• 3:33
  to not leap to the economic problem as being the primary problem. Every one of our problems, we have huge economic challenges with any path you take, and this one can really be difficult for some families. But it's so important to say that first and foremost, these are always questions of priorities, that you have to decide that, is this a high enough priority? And in a world in which we're not going to starve,
• 4:02
  We have to admit that primarily these are conversations and questions around what do we see as higher priorities? It will be very difficult for a lot of people. And like one of the commenters mentioned, they were stuck in kind of a lower middle class. So socioeconomic level in order for them to be able to homeschool their kids. And they had to say yes to that because their priority for homeschooling was higher. Now, we are not saying that everyone must homeschool. This is not a conversation.
• 4:31
  that we're having around whether or not homeschooling is good or bad or should should always be done or not. Our family did about 80% homeschooling, 20% public school. My daughter is a sophomore right now. Our only daughter who's in school and she's in public school right now. Almost all of our kids went to public school for a few years and we can give you guys reasons for that. We've talked about that in the podcast a lot.
• 4:49
  So we're not sort of like diehard homeschoolers, although we did do mostly homeschooling. But we do think that it's really important to understand that this is a question of priorities. And I always want to frame it this way.
• 5:04
  If you somehow knew that you had a child, let's say your children were in the school system, and you knew that one of your children was not going to really thrive spiritually or emotionally,
• 5:20
  in some really critical area of their life, spiritually, emotionally, intellectually. But of course, in our world, we really care about their spiritual development first. Their emotional development, of course, is super important to us. If you knew that your child was not thriving in that school and that they needed to come out from that influence, whether it's really negative peer influences, what would you be willing to do?
• 5:45
  to bring them into an environment like homeschooling for a year or two like this. And this is very real for, I would say, I would say something like 80, 90 percent of middle school girls should be not in public schools. Let's just put it that way. Like.
• 6:03
  That is so difficult on young girls. The way that they're wired, it is a situation that's sort of designed to fail. For families that want their children to thrive spiritually, I do think there are girls who can handle it. I'm just telling you that the vast majority will come away with a level of damage to their spiritual life that is very difficult for them to overcome. And if you saw that happening, and my daughter in seventh grade was in public school.
• 6:32
  Uh, and we decided, uh, after about two months of her being in that situation to pull her out, um, because we just saw that it wasn't, she wasn't thriving. And we realized that she was our oldest. And so we just didn't know a lot at the time about how difficult it was going to be for her in that environment. Now we know a lot better. We've networked with a lot of families. We coach a lot of families. So we just seen this pattern over and over again, play out.
• 6:56
  And if you knew that your child was struggling, then to say, look, we're going to have to come up with an alternative solution, whether that be private school or that be homeschool, potentially in co-ops. There's lots of great online options, but sometimes immersing your children in a peer-oriented environment in which they cannot escape no matter how badly it's damaging them. That, I think, is something we at Family Teams want to challenge. We do not want to lose any of our children.
• 7:24
  And so one of the things I love about what Brett Cooper says here is she just talks about how much influence her mother had in her life. And it's really important to understand that when you are evaluating the whole topic of school, we have sort of like blinders on culturally that school is about education almost exclusively. And.
• 7:45
  And we want to make sure that it's absolutely critical that our children get the best academic education they possibly can. Isn't that the point of an education? And, of course, a huge part of what it means for children to be at that age is influence. It's what is influencing their values. That is so important. And I really think, again...
• 8:08
  prioritizing that first. And what she's saying is that I was around my mother. And if you look at somebody like Brett Cooper, who can articulate her values very well, can stand up for her values. This is somebody who has spent a lot of time in their childhood around adults.
• 8:22
  And this is one of the reasons why I think the whole conversation around socialization is kind of really important to challenge. If you were around adults in your childhood that are very well socialized, then you are going to have enormous advantages over your peers. People who have only socialized primarily with people around their own age.
• 8:43
  But if you've been socialized by adults who are well socialized, who know how to interact with their peers, know how to communicate really well, know how to communicate up and down generations, you're going to get all the benefit of that kind of socialization. I think when we talk about sort of the phenomenon of the strange homeschool child.
• 9:03
  The sort of the dirty little secret behind that oftentimes is that often when kids are under socialized because of homeschooling, that really is almost always a result of a parent or having parents who themselves are really struggling to be socialized. In other words, if you're spending whoever you spend a lot of your time with is going to have a massive outsized influence on your life.
• 9:25
  And if you're if you're at home with a mother who is very well, can very can interact very well in social environments, then you're going to thrive in the way that Brett Cooper has. If you are around parents who are really struggling in in any kind of socialization environment, they've they've got some significant quirks in that area. You're going to pass those on to your kids if you're homeschooling them and you're the one who's primarily influencing them.
• 9:50
  But I just loved the interaction around this reel. I want to share one more comment. So that was kind of the biggest challenge that we got from this reel. I wanted to share one more around kind of the most positive spin on this topic.
• 10:06
  Okay, this is from Holly and Daniel. She says, as homeschoolers, our daughter has taken beauty industry courses at 11 and is now fully certified nail tech at 14. Our son took computer science courses from Harvard, free from edX. You can pay for a certification. And he's done other courses too. He is now making AI automations, building an AI agency at 16. If you want your kids to succeed, they don't need formal education. I think this is the other really important variable to keep in mind.
• 10:36
  Education has changed forever. So much of why we had to centralize education for hundreds of years in universities and in schools is because that was the only place to get that information. You needed libraries close by because the only place to get access to that much knowledge was through books. Everything is different now because of things like YouTube, because of online courses, because of
• 11:01
  All kinds of technology because of what we have access to on the Internet. And to pretend as if we are still living in an age that knowledge is centralized and the only way to get access to it is to create or a situation that's highly convenient for teachers as opposed to students. That day is over.
• 11:21
  And what you really want to do is train your children how to learn quickly and how to learn well, how to get access to all that information. What this person is saying is, look, what's really difficult is if there's only one or two hours of real education going on in a seven hour time span within a school setting.
• 11:37
  If you begin to really train your children how to learn quickly on their own and give them access to really good courses and good certification programs like this mother has, then the speed at which they're going to be educated and the degree to which their education is going to result in income.
• 11:54
  is going to increase exponentially. We've seen this with our kids. We've seen this with lots of other families. So it's really important that you don't think about your children growing up in an atmosphere of education that you grew up in. They are growing up in a totally different world with access to different tools, and they're going to also be facing very different challenges. And so it's really important as moms and dads that we upgrade our understanding
• 12:16
  that what we really need to be doing is aiming at lifelong learning with our kids and teaching them how to quickly acquire skills through these different portals that are designed to do rapid education in areas, especially that are economically viable, as that's going to change very quickly for our kids with the advent of so much of this technology and AI and different things like that. So hopefully that's helpful kind of context. I really enjoyed the comments in this section. I wanted to share those. Okay, let's talk about another one.
• 12:45
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• 13:03
  Each month, you'll get a short teaching, a set of tools, and a simple playbook you can walk through with your spouse. It's built for busy families, but more importantly, it's built to last. You don't need hype. You need a plan. If that resonates with you, check it out at familyteams.com slash accelerator. All right, the second one is Erika Komisar talking about how...
• 13:26
  Neurologically fragile little boys. I think she's primarily talking about boys that are, you know, one, two, three, four years old. How neurologically fragile they are at that young age compared to girls. So take a listen to this. Boys are neurologically more fragile than girls. Boys don't survive as much because they are incredibly neurologically fragile.
• 13:46
  emotionally fragile too. What that means is they're more prone to aggression, behavioral problems, ADHD-like behaviors, which is distractibility. They're more sensitive to stress from a very young age. They are not the same as girls. They don't learn the same way as girls. They need lots of physical expression during the day. If they don't get it and they're forced to sit in circle time, like little girls can sit in circle time, little boys go off the rails and then they're labeled as having attentional issues.
• 14:14
  And so we are educating little boys today, like little girls, which is why they can't keep up. So if you ask me, we should separate little boys and little girls in terms of the neurological fragility. They need that attachment figure even more than the little girls. When it comes to going to school, maybe we should separate little boys and little girls when they're little, so we can cater to their individual needs. And it is different.
• 14:36
  All right, so now this reel got almost half a million views. It's continuing to be shared a lot online. There are some interesting conversations that this erupted in the comment section, so I want to talk through a few of these. One is, my mother-in-law kept telling me that my son was going to become a mama's boy because I gave him so much attention as a baby and young child. But because of this, he had no problems leaving me to go to school and has become a wonderful man, husband, and father.
• 15:00
  This is from Calabee Hill. I love this perspective. Yes, we're talking about really young boys. This concern that they're going to be a mama's boy when they're really little and super fragile emotionally. I think that this is often just a...
• 15:16
  An imposition of the idea that men are wired a certain way need a certain level of strength and invulnerability. I think there is some truth to that about men. But to impose those same ideas on really, really young boys who are two, three years old and saying, OK, you need to man up a two year old.
• 15:36
  This is just a misunderstanding of how development works with boys and girls. But Erika Komisar is pointing out is so valuable. And that is that it's not necessarily at all. She's not denigrating how fragile young girls are. Of course, they are as well. But I think she's saying that if you had to compare them and we just we were talking to some friends of ours who said that they had a daughter who was in the NICU. And the nurses said to her, look, you have to understand that if you're if this was a boy, he would not have made it.
• 16:05
  We and they were very familiar with a lot of the issues going on with very young infants and that that boys are more fragile at this young age. And so a lot of people in the medical profession, as well as, of course, developmental psychologists have understood this dynamic for a long time. This is just not very well known by the by the population at large. OK, another comment that I thought was interesting. But also, why don't we stop expecting young children to sit still with my four year old girl cannot sit in circle time either?
• 16:35
  Uh, part of the problem is just the way we educate. We design the industrial education around what is most convenient for the teacher and not what is actually in the best interest of the students. And so oftentimes we're saying, well, we need childcare for our, our kids so that parents can go off to work. And so they are not only being emotionally separated way too young from their moms and dads.
• 16:54
  But then they end up in circle time and in these sort of situations in which attention and not being rambunctious, not being sort of just naturally gregarious or physical. These things are expected of children that are way too young for them, but that they're needed by kind of the way we are educating kids.
• 17:13
  Another comment that got a lot of attention is, wow, I love this perspective, especially because I think we talk a lot about how boys need their dads more at certain points in their lives. But with little boys, the one they really need is their mother. And I love I live this every day with my boys. I'm their whole world right now. This makes so much sense to me. Thanks for the reminder to be present with them and attentive to those needs. Yes, we do. We talk a ton here at Family Teams about the importance of fathers in the lives of boys. But it's important to break that down developmentally.
• 17:42
  in these really early stages, they need their mother. Their mother is sort of, as Erika Komisar kind of points out, if you kind of listen to a lot of what she writes about this, they're almost an extension of, like the child is almost an extension. The mother is nervous system, it's almost like in that child and that they feel that bond and breaking that bond through putting them in a lengthy daycare at a very young age is really, really hard on kids, but especially boys. And so something can actually break inside of them
• 18:11
  in ways that can really hurt them over the long term, their emotional development, their mental development. And so we have really underemphasized how much young boys need their mother in this really early stage in order to maximize freedom for women. And I think it's really important that we now take a step back and just say, look, we've got to be objective about this. What is actually happening?
• 18:33
  and the lives of these young boys and that they do need their mother and that we need to prize and really lift up the importance that mothers play in the lives of young boys and young girls, but especially to understand the level of fragility that young boys have at this stage. Okay, last one. Every mom, this must be somebody from England, who has a son finds out pretty quickly they are more fragile in a sense. It's not a bad thing. They need cuddles. Yes.
• 18:59
  Thank you. And yes, they need their mum. And I think this is such an important conversation we need to have. We need to take a step back and really understand what's happening with boys and girls, boys and girls developmentally. All right, guys, hopefully that was helpful. I love listening and to these comments, getting to interact with them, seeing some of the discussions that this this brings out. So, yeah, if you're not on Instagram, like check us out on some of these reels. We are.
• 19:23
  really trying to find perspectives that really fit with what it means for us to build our families into teams. And a lot of these perspectives, I think, are really important. So thank you guys for interacting on there. Definitely leave your comments on this YouTube video, as well as over on Instagram. We'd love to interact with them as well. See ya.
• 19:42
  Thank you for listening to the Family Teams podcast. If you're enjoying this content or have learned something new, please make sure to leave a rating and review and share with a friend. To stay up to date with our events, new content, and products, you can follow us on Facebook and Instagram at Family Teams.